Improving TLB Performance by Increasing Hugepage Ratio

Luo, Taowei; Wang, Xiaolin; Hu, Jingyuan; Luo, Yingwei; Wang, Zhenlin

doi:10.1109/ccgrid.2015.36

Cited by 6 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…Figure 2 shows how PMDs can be polluted in such process, which causes failures on hugepage allocation. In our benchmarks, most failures on hugepage allocation are due to rules (3) and (4). An application might repeatedly request a small piece of memory and then access it.…”

Section: The Usage Of Transparent Hugepagementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Our preliminary study indicates that by making aligned memory requests, the kernel can allocate many more hugepages in page fault handling process [4]. This section details the design and implementation of ABH.…”

Section: Alignment-based Hugepage (Abh): Design and Implementationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The base line is native mode with THP. Native mode with ABH, Xen's para-virtualization, HAP and shadow paging with ABH in Xen and KVM are included for our comparison 4) . Figure 11 shows the result.…”

Section: Impact Of Different Virtualization Environmentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Evaluating the impacts of hugepage on virtual machines

Wang

Luo

et al. 2016

Sci. China Inf. Sci.

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Modern applications often require a large amount of memory. Conventional 4KB pages lead to large page tables and thus exert high pressure on TLB address translations. This pressure is more prominent in a virtualized system, which adds an additional layer of address translation. Page walks due to TLB misses can result in a significant performance overhead. One effort in reducing this overhead is to use hugepage. Linux kernel has supported transparent hugepage since 2.6.38, which provides an alternate large page size. Generally, hugepage demonstrates better performance on address translations and page table modifications. This paper first analyzes the impact of hugepage on native system, and then, compares the impact of hugepage on different memory virtualization approaches: hardware-assisted paging (HAP), shadow paging, and para-virtualization. We observe that the current implementation of transparent hugepage is inefficient. It cannot exploit the full performance advantage of hugepages. Worse yet, the conservative strategy of transparent hugepage may conflict with existing OS functions, which can lead to performance degradation. So, we propose a new memory allocation strategy, alignment-based hugepage (ABH) that promotes hugepage allocations. We apply ABH to different paging modes in virtualized systems. The results show that the new allocation strategy can significantly reduce TLB misses and up to 90% page walk cycles due to TLB misses and thus improve the performance in real world applications.

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Section: The Usage Of Transparent Hugepagementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Alignment-based Hugepage (Abh): Design and Implementationmentioning

confidence: 99%